There is no doubt that everyone in their working life will make a mistake – might be small or might be large. In business clients can become upset over many things. Sometimes they are upset because they owe money and they have decided to not pay it. I remember learning about the gratitude scale at university. It works something like this: at the beginning of an investigation the client is very grateful and hands over that retainer with minimal difficulty; that gratitude continues until the investigation is completed – that is when you get the client to pay any outstanding fees – the gratitude starts decreasing once they have the results and the harder it becomes to collect. So no verbal results or report is handed over until the bill is agreed upon and the client has handed you the outstanding funds. It makes sense. Twice I have been left holding the bag because I did not follow what I preached and had to place accounts in collections or small claims.

In the meantime many of these unpleasant clients resort to social media to defame the company or the owners or both. SOCIAL MEDIA – the over-valued communication system used to promote business and evaluate business. Most businesses find this way too demanding to keep up with – twitter, facebook, instagram, snapchat,linkedin, and on and on. At the same time your haters use the same media to attempt to destroy your business or your reputation . Worse is that you probably do not even know it is happening because you are so busy working your business. So many negative reviews are completed on almost every business because the reviewer has a bone to pick, or is simply a nasty person, and more importantly who are the food critics today? Everyone has an opinion on a restaurant – based on what experiences I ask? But enough of that. I was pondering this fact about social media the other day when I heard on CBC that an individual had won his court case against his neighbour who had made very negative comments on facebook about him due to a neighbourly dispute. Reference – http://www.news1130.com/2016/04/21/abbotsford-woman-must-pay-damages-for-facebook-comments/:

So google reviews, yelp reviews and what ever else exists out there should require that the person identify themself through some form of identity verification so that they cannot hide behind a pseudonym – the person stalking and harassing our company goes by the name “Marilyn Monroe”. Her statements are untrue and unfair and when we catch them we reply. But now we have another job to do with social media – not just send out info but keep on top of the haters. The good news though is that now we can sue these people for defamation.

I am undecided on whether or not Social Media is a good thing. Sometimes I long for the quiet of years of past.

So i thought a good recipe to post would be something plummy. You know all prunes are plums but not all plums are prunes. Sums up social media for me.